Marking 200 For OpEdNews: The Best of Times (Sex With Ducks), The Worst of Times (The Deaver Fetus)

I'm tired. If you want to feel the frenetic pace my writing life has been like, just click on this old Leroy Anderson tune of a typewriter and read along. It will set a light tone to some very heavy subjects (hey, that's my style!).* 

Marking 200? No, I'm not 200 years old, although sometimes I feel like it. And tabulating how much I've submitted to OpEdNews for the last 3 years makes me feel older: it's certainly not a prodigious output by any means, but my perspective is queer: it's not how much I put out, but how much I am able to fit in. In between things, that is: no, not a sob story, but one that compels me to relay it to OpEdNews readers because they've been a part of my life.

For the last 5 years, I've been a caregiver to a loved one who is terminally ill (liver cancer) and life has gone from week-to-week, to day-to-day. Now, it's kind of hour-to-hour. It's also cooking, cleaning, errands, hospital visits, prescription refills, doling out meds, travel planning, kitty care, and fending off labels like "angel" and "saint" (curses on the love life - saints and angels don't get laid.). Not that I'm complaining, but ...o.k., I'm complaining. Because amidst all of this I'm compelled to communicate to people news and views about the realms of religion and politics ... and everything in between.

Yeah, it's an addiction: first thing in the morning I scan google alerts (at least a dozen "men of the cloth" are arrested for various crimes each day), devour rss feeds, answer comments on the blog, and plan the new ministry. I eventually come up for coffee (not air), then I have a breakfast consisting of religious and political hypocrisies, then I uncover them, rant on them and laugh at them. (I have to laugh at them: I take to heart Mark Twain's dictum: "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.") The rest of the day alternates between something mundane like changing the sheets and writing about the latest malapropisms of Michele Bachmann or the newest pronouncements of Benedict XVI.

Occasionally, I indulge myself with the luxury of our view of the ocean and the realization that I live in the most beautiful and compassionate place on earth (San Francisco).

IT'S ALL PERSPECTIVE

Times are getting bleaker and there's w-a-a-ay too much to rant about: atrocities like The Deaver Fetus and David Kato's murder in Uganda infest my laptop screen like giant termites, making it harder to laugh. The viciousness of today's Christof*scism, the blatant bigotry of people like Bryan Fischer and the eviscerating evangelism of Lou Engle propose a future too dreadful to imagine. Turning them on their ears becomes less fun, hence more difficult to write about.

Oh, occasionally Pat Robertson comes up with a hoot, a statement so self-righteously inane that it wipes the brain clean of all seriousness,* but writing about senile musings is too easy and breezy: the psyche just starts to relax when up comes a horror worthy of Halloween: suddenly there is too little time to write about LGBT issues, Islamoph*bia or even Ann Coulter(geist). 

Then there's the outright ruthlessness of the newly invigorated Republican Party: I hope I don't drown in that tsunami of vengeance! It overwhelms humanity! Don't get me started.

BACK TO THE POINT

OpEdNews has been a godsend for writers like me: the chance to get a word in edgewise is coupled with an association of some of the brightest minds we have today. And knowing that some people out there are actually reading my rants helps me contend with all that's happening to me and to the rest of the world. So now I'm up to 200 articles (150,000 words. 300,000 page views). I may flag a bit in the future, but I'll never kick the addiction of writing about the Right Wing's religious world of hypocrisy or things like ...Sex with Ducks. 

*Sorry if you're too young to know what a typewriter sounds like

** The article that has garnered me the most page views is, ironically, the one about Pat Robertson's remarks about Haiti titled The Senility Defense: Pat Robertson's Trial In The Court Of Public Opinion.